I would normally wait until Friday to do this, but a particularly timely link came across my RSS reader last night…

Ada Initiative campaign:

When I read my RSS feeds last night, I discovered that a number of librarians have coordinated a campaign to donate to the Ada Initiative, which supports women in open technology and culture. You can read more about the matching donations campaign. That post includes links to other posts why this is so important for librarians and people working in (and using, and caring about) libraries that are worth reading too.

Welcome to the last post in this series of file management discussions (at least unless people have more questions! I plan to talk about tagging next, which is related, but different. And maybe my thoughts on using Wikipedia and other crowd-sourced tools sensibly. Suggestions and questions and such make me go “oooh” and put particular topics first, so feel free to suggest your favorites)

Anyway, the last topic on file management I really want to address is the question of what to keep. When I started using computers, hard drive space was precious and finite, and at some point, you generally had to look at deleting old material, or saving it to a long-term storage device that was more of a pain to access. These days, not only is storage cheaper, but I can use tools like my Time Capsule and Dropbox so that backing up files takes very little additional time and energy, and that deleting them often isn’t necessary.

(Have a good backup plan. And have a way to back up essential files that lives outside your house, in case of emergency/natural disaster/whatever. Some people swap USB drives with friends, or mail a DVD every few months to relatives out of state, both of which have some password protection options.)

On the other hand, large piles of files we’re never going to touch again, or that can be accessed in other ways make digital clutter that makes it hard to find the stuff we want to use.

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Time for the next installment on “How I manage files”, this one on naming. As with the other parts of this series of posts, there’s stuff that works for me that may not work for you, and vice versa (feel free to share in comments!)

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Before I get into the series of “How I manage my files” that people seem to be interested in, I thought it might be a good idea to talk a bit about some very general structure of how I use my computer. Geography is really sort of the right word, except that this geography, I get to move things around, at least within broad limits.